Wot I think: Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Ultimate Edition

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If there’s one thing you expect from a Castlevania game, it’s Patrick Stewart. Sorry I mean vampires! Definitely vampires. Lords of Shadow has coffins full of the buggers, though it’s shy about the fact and sticks them behind one of the most turgid and over-extended openings I’ve ever had the misfortune to play through. Things do get sexy, but to find out about Gabriel Belmont’s combat cross you gotta jump, jump.
RPS readers are famous for their enjoyment of console-to-PC ports that add little beyond an increase in resolution and rely on your having, basically, a 360 controller or its equivalent. That’s what this is; I tried playing with the keyboard and, y’know, that’s not happening. The ‘Ultimate Edition’ subtitle refers to this having the console DLC, which is a few extra levels tying up plot holes, and three years after release is no less than you’d expect.

So LoS has had the minimum of sprucing-up, but in its favour is the fact that PC isn’t the king of platforms when it comes to 3D beat-em-ups. Sadly the finest developers in this particular genre, i.e. Platinum Games, haven’t yet made their PC debut – though Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, which is one of the best games ever ever ever, is on its way.

But let’s put that to one side for the moment, and look at what we’ve got. LoS is and was developer Mercury Steam’s attempt to bring Konami’s classic Castlevania series into 3D; it’s part beat-em-up, part Uncharted-style platformer, and sprinkled with countless one-off set pieces.

The most initially surprising thing, what with this being a Castlevania game and all, is how generic much of it feels. Let’s put it this way: if the final third was lopped off, and LoS was renamed The Lord of the Rings: Aragorn-a Getcha, you wouldn’t even need to change the main character model.

This is perhaps my biggest disappointment with the game, because when I think of Castlevania my mind is filled with flickering candles and gloomy castles, a world where even the cutlery has a baroque-gothic vibe. LoS does have all of this stuff, but it’s such a long time until you see any of it that the damage is done. To give credit where it is due, LoS is very much its own take on Castlevania and there’s no doubt this is often an incredible-looking game. The earlier environments might not be much fun to play through but they’re often jaw-dropping, and the environmental art direction throughout is first-rate (though paired up with a temperamental automatic camera).

I’d guesstimate there’s six to eight hours of goblins, mini-werewolves, flying gremlins, crappy platforming, and all sorts of other tossed-off fantasy archetypes before LoS gets good. I mean really: goblins?!? The game is aiming for the kind of warped fantasy style you get in Guillermo del Toro films, but its enemy design sucks in a bad way.

By the time an interesting opponent, nevermind a vampire, turned up in LoS I’d had three children and a mid-life crisis. Once I’d recovered and eBayed the Harley-Davidson, I started to think about the game’s structure. There’s a lot of good stuff here, but it’s padded out with an enormous amount of mediocre nonsense. It’s hard to blame the developers for this, because many critics and consumers seem to actually *enjoy* the wall-climbing and scenery-traversal of games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider.

You do get to look at pretty views, but this kind of interaction is braindead; holding in one direction and watching your character scramble up a surface, holding another direction for a bit, maybe a jump here or there. OMG there are even bits where you can swing or wall-run! The thing is that climbing and platforming in 3D is very hard to do right, and so what you often get instead is this kind of autopilot mode – Gabriel homes in on jumpable platforms, while the next ledge or swingpoint is highlighted with an unsubtle shine (this can be turned off in the options). LoS also has a terrible habit of putting enemies at the end of these sections, and putting the checkpoint before them; so if you die in the fight you’ve got to clamber again before having another pop.

This linearity stands for the game as a whole. 2D Castlevania is known for its layered environmental design, but I don’t think there’s any problem with LoS taking a different approach. Unfortunately the developers didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions here and, in an attempt to shoehorn some backtracking into the design, the earlier levels have collectibles you can’t get at until you’ve acquired a certain tool. This is unnecessary, pointless, and you really won’t want to do it.

You may be thinking LoS is a total writeoff at this point, and the sad thing is it’s not. It looks amazing, the soundtrack is awesome, and it has the best story of any Castlevania game. LoS is at its core a combat game and its system – though simple – is superbly animated and enormous fun to master. Gabriel’s main weapon is a crucifix that somehow also contains a 50-foot chain, which he wields like a combination of bo staff and whip, and over the course of the game it simply gets more and more badass; pretty soon the chain has giant spikes on it, before eventually the cross becomes the stake of stakes.

Most fights are against groups of enemies, and the key mechanics are block timing and Gabriel’s light / dark meters. Blocking an incoming attack at the right time means you’ll parry the attack, which results in a big flash and slowdown effect – the timing window for this is huge compared to the ‘best in genre’ like Bayonetta or MGR:R, but it’s still satisfying to execute. The slowdown serves a purpose, too, because Gabe’s meters can be triggered during it; go into ‘light’ mode and he regains health while laying the smack down, while ‘dark’ mode multiplies the damage being dealt.

LoS is far from the best combat system I’ve played with – the parry window is far too wide, and it’s impossible to interrupt attack animations with block which leads to rather boring defensive play against the tougher enemies. But it’s also a lot of good-old fashioned fun. As the game goes on and your opposition becomes more challenging, there’s a definite thrill in how you can control a crowd before parrying and absolutely smashing down the biggest nasties. The boss fights start off terribly, with half-baked (though visually impressive) tributes to Shadow of the Colossus, but by the game’s latter half there are wave-based gauntlets that focus on stretching your skills rather than merely looking nice.

This is probably the most annoying thing about LoS. There are some properly great fights throughout the game, ding-dongers that have you clutching the pad and relying on instinct as much as finishers. The problem is not that there’s too little of this – there’s plenty – but that the experience as a whole is so padded with bad fights and below-average platforming and puzzles.

Some might see that another way, and fair enough. In an age of seven hour campaigns LoS certainly bucks that trend: in terms of sheer hours and sights to see, there’s value for money here and then some.

My favourite moment in the Castlevania series to date, and I’m sure many of you feel the same, is at the ‘end’ of Symphony of the Night – when the castle flips, and you realise the game’s just become twice as big. It’s a cruel irony that Lords of Shadow would have been a superb reinvention of Castlevania – if only it was half the size.

67 Comments

Mention the Pan fight! It’s one of the greatest brawl-em-up fights in recent history. Easily the caliber of the Dante on Vergil fights (in their various forms) throughout the DMC series.

And the way the game rewards you for excellence (not getting hit at ALL) with incredibly quick magic charging so you can pull off the beautifully rendered magic attacks.

And how it gives you a literal “oh-shit”-button in the red crystals. Hell the entire Labyrinth/Red Crystal section of the game is where everything ramps up ten notches, and the entire story and gameplay suddenly goes crazy.

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I picked this up for consoles after hearing how it’s the best 3D Castlevania to date. Which doesn’t seem like it’s saying much, and, as it turns out, isn’t really saying much. For a series that lends half its name to a genre, it has none of the great open backtracking that makes Castlevania games great. Instead, it’s largely linear levels, good-not-great combat, and frequently frustrating platforming (even with the unsubtle shine, a lot of things you can jump on, rappel from, or grapple up end up blending in too well with the lush environments). It’s pretty good as the kind of game it is, but it’s more DMC than Castlevania by far and that kept me from finishing it.

This is exactly how I feel (having played the demo and watched some other gameplay footage.) They could have just called it DMC 5 and nobody would have noticed. A real proper Castlevania game would be absolutely amazing and could easily be game of the year, and they make this padded, uninspired nonsense?

Well, not to mention that the DMC comparisons would bother me a lot less if those elements of the game were done better to begin with. I had never played the console version of this game, and when I loaded this game up the first time, I came away from the first two hours feeling like I had just spent $30 on an incredibly watered down version of the recent DMC reboot. Stilted, dull writing, less responsive combat, and platforming whose potential is severely restricted by the linear level design and lack of camera control. Setting aside the Castlevania license, I can still put the two games side and by side and say, “This is how you do it right, this is how you do it wrong.”

I can forgive the game a lot for the quality of the art design, though. I’m sure I’ll find more time for it eventually.

You do realize that less than half of the Castlevanias have been Metroid-likes? And that the series started off as a fairly linear 2D brawler – and continued in that vain for a long time?
If anything this Castlevania is more in the spirit of the original than any of the Metroidlikes.

CV1, CV3 and SNES CV4 are considered the true classics of Castlevania. SoTN was a playstation generation game that added all sorts of RPG elements and added hugely unnecessary repetition and backtracking.

You’d only consider SOTN a classic if you never grew up on the previous 4 games. i.e. it’s entirely age dependent. If you’re young you pick SOTN, if you’re older and grew up with CV you pick any of the following NES CV1, CV3, SNES CV4

I appreciate the simplicity of “guy with a whip goes to fight Dracula in his castle” over a forced narrative delivered through QTEs and climbing puzzles masquerading as boss fights. It is a case of less is more, to me.

And even saying that….Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness both feel like they achieved better 3d action than what I’m seeing in LoS. The fights against schlubs are so easy, and sporadic, that just about the time you’re getting the feel for combat it’s over, and you have another 2 cutscenes, 3 QTEs and some platforming to get through before you can fight again.

If you played all the castlevanias then the statement makes sense. I’ve played all of them. The N64 + PS2 castlevania’s. (which comprises the “3D” CV’s). And lords of shadow is among the best. The PS2 3D castlevania’s had huge problems. They were just mediocre/average. LOS is easily miles better.

This game was developed by at least some of the team from Rebel Act Studios which released the unique and atmospheric Severance: Blade of Darkness in 2001, and it shows. Obvious gameplay differences notwithstanding, there’s a sense of place in Lords of Shadow which makes the game stand out from the intrinsically plastic LotR rip-offs that most fantasy worlds in video games boil down to.

The whole Stewart-narrated loading screens were annoyingly familiar because I couldn’t place what they reminded me of until my brain clicked and remember Severance’s between-levels narration. The Severance lineage really shows.

oo, Severance was so damn epic. Would love another one. I think it was even more about pure hard combat than the various ‘Souls’.
Incredible atmosphere too, at the time. And of course, immensely satisfying bloody violence.

Sorry guys: didn’t like this review. Took a lot to get to the point, and it is not bright enough to let itself be so unclear about if this is just another console port of an action-adventure game with jumping, a “serious” tone and final bosses, or if there is something else like what make a Metroidvania such a good game: exploration, real character, ambience…

Metacritic score is usually the most objective parameter of game quality, and it can point You to good, informative reviews. I usually look at those near the median score.

Edit: A poor choice of words perhaps. What I think is that Metacritic score is not objective of game’s quality per se, but it is as objective as game quality assessment can get. Or in other words, I think Metacritic score is as close to objectivity when assessing a game’s quality as it can possibly be, but it is not objective (completely objective) of it.

My choice of words might not have been optimal. What I think is that Metacritic score is the most objective indicator of game’s quality, or in other words, it is something that is as close to objectiveness as it can get. Metacritic score is not “objective” of game’s quality per se, as games are subject to personal preferences so one game can be terrible for someone while good for others, but it is as objective as these things (game quality assessment) can be.

Thing is, “objective quality” doesn’t matter in the slightest. What matters is your own subjective quality, that is, how much you personally will like the game. There are many games that I understand are objectively great, but didn’t click with me, as there are many that I understand are objectively poor, but I had a lot of fun with.

Of course, since the only people who can provide you with a subjective review is yourself, that’s not great purchasing advice. The only way to shop consciously is to have a few websites or reviewers you trust, and more importantly read what people are saying in forums and such. Metacritic is biased towards reviews with scores and I find them to be poor – a reviewer is almost certain to decide the game’s score beforehand, and will subconciously attempt to justify their score rather than review the game neutrally. If one does go to Metacritic, then my advice would still be completely opposed to yours – read the worst and best reviews. The worst reviews will dwell on the negatives and will let you know of anything that you’d consider a deal breaker. and the best ones will dwell on the positives and give you an idea of how forgiving you’ll be of a game’s flaws.

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I loved it on the PS3 it was great fun with a group of friends. The online was pretty sketchy though. When my PS3 was destroyed by being properly soaked in beer, I proceeded to get it for pc. It runs smoother and looks better and the online is generally lag free! I feel they did an excellent job with the port, plus I can have a friend use his preferred xbox controller I use a PS3 controller and my other friends can use the arcade sticks with nary an issue.I can fully endorse it as the best MK since 3 IMO.

A friend gifted it to me for my birthday a few weeks ago and its pretty fun. Nothing real special about the combat or level design but the story so far is good enough and its pretty fun in short bursts. I would say if your interested wait for a sale. I really wish they would make a stupidly huge and awesome metriodvania game like SOTN. I know there’s a bunch of them on hand held systems but I don’t own any of those plus I wanna see a metriodvania without handheld limitations.

I definitely plan on picking this up soon, there are so few decent action platformers on the PC and the art design here is fantastic.

“RPS readers are famous for their enjoyment of console-to-PC ports that add little beyond an increase in resolution and rely on your having, basically, a 360 controller or its equivalent.”

I’m assuming “enjoyment” here is used sarcastically? Because this has to be one of my biggest complaints about the PC game community (not just RPS, in fact it’s generally worse elsewhere.) It’s obnoxious when every time a console port is released people just sit around belly aching that the developers couldn’t design a good keyboard interface (here a tip: most console action games do not translate well to a keyboard, gamepads are not the devil) or the lack of some esoteric and barely noticeable graphical feature. Isn’t the fact that you can play these games on your PC good enough? Aren’t higher resolutions and better frame rates a good thing?

Here’s to hoping the sequel gets a PC release as well, it’s looking very promising.

Action games do actually translate quite well to keyboard+mouse (see Darksiders.) It’s just that many games are either hampered by design limitations (in Castlevania’s case, the fixed camera) or are ported very poorly (see Dark Souls.)

(here a tip: most console action games do not translate well to a keyboard, gamepads are not the devil)

I tried Darksiders with a 360 controller, but I found a mouse and keyboard setup offered significantly better control. The slight loss of analog movement was more than made up for by the vastly superior camera control. Being able to easily keep track of where the enemies are in combat seemed much more important than diagonal character movement, particularly when the analog camera movement basically allows you to move in any direction anyway. And between the keyboard and a 5-button mouse, I feel like all the controls are more readily under my fingers than when I’m trying to navigate all 4 face buttons on a controller with just a thumb that’s also supposed to be moving the camera at the same time.

I’ve been playing it for a couple of hours and so far I’d say Darksiders is 100 times better. This game (again, so far,) has been incredibly boring and generic. If I still have to endure 4-6 more hours of it until I get to the good parts, I think I’ll just call it quits

I agree with you completely. Any game that involves camera control will be immensely better with a mouse, and Darksiders plays fantastically with one. This game has no mouse support at all because it has a fixed camera so there’s no point. Playing a 3D action game (even a very limited one) with two hands on the keyboard is a nightmare so you definitely need a gamepad, though the game’s so padded and uninspired I wouldn’t even bother.

That’s why I’m always surprised when everybody say: “if you want to play Dark Souls buy a gamepad”. Bullshit. If I couldn’t run and rotate camera at the same time I would never beat some bosses (Ornstein & Smough especially).

If you can’t press B and manipulate both sticks at once, you’re controllering wrong. Console gaming is all about being able to get multiple fingers on the right half on the controller, because someone decided to place seventy buttons in a place where you naturally only have one finger.

Except Dark Souls is deliberately laid out so that all combat takes place with the triggers so your thumbs are free to use the thumbsticks and not worry about the face buttons. Yet another reason why the game is so elegant.

One of my favourite beat-em-up’s ever. Yes it may not have the tech razzle dazzle of Bayonetta but what I like is the soul calibur/ivy inspired attack variants that actually make a tactical difference. Plus it’s not all about 1000 attacks per second I can’t even physically perceive.

Unlocks lead to huge attack variation possibilities, and unlike god of war, when you’re facing later enemies you’re not forced to use simple attacks to prevent over-extending yourself – there’s still very cool attacks that work.

Yes it doesn’t start all stereotypically gothic but when you do get into the castle sections the presentation crushes anything castlevania has ever had for gothic castly goodness.

Hold me for I feel the same way. While Bayonetta probably is techically the best for reasons my eyes cannot follow I enjoyed this more. I just felt the slower combat worked in my favour I really utterly loved the light/dark system. Oh well, I hope this doesn’t put people off at least trying it. The thing I agree with most is the reasonably slow start.

In the eye of the beholder, then. I really like this game. And all that stuff before you get to the castle contains probably my favourite set of levels in it, which is the lonely ruined castle with the ogre fight and the witch at the top.

I agree with the review (about 3 hours in at the moment) except on one point: the story.

It’s a cliche mess of tropes. It really feels like every generic fantasy story line I’ve ever been handed. (Brooding hero, a murdered wife, “EVILLLLLLL”, Prophecy, convenient plot movements, wild changes in scenery that don’t follow any logic other than the imperative to wow the player. Bad guys who exist solely so you can steal their power and full the prophecy.)

I mean, Castlevania was never overflowing with a deep, meaningful story. And the attempt to put one on it feels like the primary reason there are so many levels full of crap and contorted logic, because someone felt they needed to make a world out of a game that takes place almost entirely in a castle.

But what’s most annoyed me about this game is how far away they put you from the thing you crave: the goddamn castle! They’ve removed the majority of exploration, discovery and collection. What made Castlevania magical is it felt like the castle contained a whole world full of grim, gothic adventures. LoS has taken the main character out of the story and tried to substitute them with locations and NPCs you don’t know and don’t care about.

LoS feels like a stale set piece, that while it looks fantastic, keeps you at arm’s length the whole game, while simultaneously forcing you down linear corridors choked full of cutscenes. Add in a shit load of QTE’s and I’m not finding I’m enjoying LoS. I’m tolerating it so far, hoping I come across something that is genuinely cool. The only thing this game does unequivocally well is the visuals.

I enjoyed the running through crumbling scenes in Uncharted 3. I thought it was a very fun game. Tomb Raider on the other hand was very dry and boring and didn’t do anything as well as Uncharted. The combat was less responsive and it didn’t have a perfectly executed transition between melee and ranged combat. Also the set pieces weren’t as well done. If this can mirror the set pieces from Uncharted it means we have at least one of those kinds of games actually done well on PC, which I think we deserve.

I was expecting it to be more positive than this. The light/dark meter really just clicked with me though, and I’m not that great at other games in this genre so maybe it was just me. I liked the hamminess of it all too.

The first pic makes me hope this is a fairytale picaresque of the adventures of a monster dentist.
(Imagine Shadow of the Colossus like this. You ride your horse up the thing’s back, climb the rest of the way and… knock out that sore tooth in Errol Flynn fashion. Much less grumpy Colossus, villagers happy etc. But then it all turns tragic when your horse dies of an infection because you don’t have small enough tools to help it)

Personally I love the game. There are better playing brawlers, that’s true, but on PC we have precisely one – the new Devil May Cry; and LoS’s combat is never bad, it’s just that it doesn’t match up to the high watermarks of some it’s peers. Perhaps because I’m not a reviewer that’s become jaded from overexposure, I still found the traversal bits and incidental battles to be entertaining. The minor gameplay foibles I did notice were more than offset by the game’s style, music, and dulcet tones of Patrick Stewart :)

That’s all subjective of course, but there is one thing in the review that I believe is unfair: complaining that the mouse and keyboard controls don’t work well in a fixed camera brawler l is like complaining they don’t work well in a hardcore flight sim. It’s not a matter of being lazy port, it’s a matter of digital movement control simply not being suited to this type of game – you need 360° analog movement control for a fixed camera game. There’s likely nothing they could have done to the keyboard and mouse controls to make them more natural, so dinging them for it doesn’t seem right. If you want to playing a flight sim, you should have a joystick; if you want to play a fixed camera game (that has direct character control), you should have an analog gamepad.

I’m a big fan of Darksiders, but I guess I consider that to be a somewhat different type of game – closer to Zelda. I don’t think it’s more deliberate lock-on based combat fills quite the same niche as the combo heavy focus of God of War/Devil May Cry type brawlers, but I admit I might be splitting hairs there.

DMC4 certainly though, I haven’t played it, but I know it’s a well respected game.

Regardless we don’t see a ton of these types of a games on PC and we will never get the games that are arguably the pinnacle of the genre (God of War series).

Darksiders is a brawler, it mathematically plays the same. Math > internet moron bullshit. Only morons miscategorize it as ‘adventure’. Modern Zelda technically is a 3D combat game, only a tradition of simplified combat and it’s original 2D origins keep it in the ‘adventure/easymode’ miscategorization morons on the internet came up with.

I found this game to be hit or miss with friends of mine. Personally, I found it amazing to play. A lot of people jumped on the castlevania bandwagon with SotN and players who just want more and more of that may be disjointed by this one (possibly not by it’s direct sequel).

This is an amazingly fun game. It manages to do justice to as much of the lore as it possibly can (and more, if you play/watch a let’s play of the 3ds bridge-story) for those who care, they do a lot of compelling characterization even with characters who aren’t all that important in the long run. Which is good, just because a character is minor doesn’t mean they have to be super generic.

The visuals are captivating. While I did have the early game reservations about the fantasy-ish setting that it seems to start with, doing so actually lays the groundwork for what kind of a story you’re going to get out of the whole thing. ie- not just horror movie stereotypes in a dreary castle. But as many have said, it DOES have that too. You just gotta work for it. ^_^

The biggest gripe I had was having to replay earlier areas to get certain things, but it seemed worse than it actually was. By the point in the game that you’re actually going to want to go back you can breeze through that section in short order. Which makes you see, more directly than you might have felt by playing through the whole thing, just how far you’ve come since then. It works for me.

It’s worth playing and I am a huge fan of encouraging some of the big console franchises to sink effort into faster and more frequent PC releases.. so go buy it! For Pony!

Some people are mistaking a ‘Wot I think’ for a review. How odd. :)
After two articles that didn’t do their writers or the game any favours, I think this one is fine. I love the ‘Wot I think’ style look at games rather than traditional reviews, because they are unashamedly opinion based. I really enjoyed LoS, I thought the story was awful, but that the game itself was great, and loved going back to find all the collectibles. :)